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[JISC] Weeknote 17/33

Well that was a busy old week. The Survive or Thrive conference took place in Manchester on Tuesday and Wednesday and after a morning of emails and Skype calls I traveled up Monday afternoon. The event was a great success I think with many great presentations, some very interesting conversations and a real opportunity (for me at least) to meet people I usually only chat with on Twitter! The event was not without its hiccups but they can be firmly laid at the feet of the hotel whose AV support was poor at best. I’ll write a full review of the event sometime this weekend hopefully.

I didn’t get home til 11pm on Wednesday night in the end so Thursday morning was a little blurry and mainly consisted of catching up on emails from the previous couple of days and arranging travel for next week plus three more Skype calls about UKOER 2! In the afternoon I met up with the Chair of a working group I am supporting to finalise the agenda for a meeting on Monday. This has been pretty tough to put together and it is weighing on my mind a little so I’ll be glad when its done. The group hasn’t met in over a year so there is a little bit of pressure to get things going again.

Friday I gave a talk at a Scholarly Activity in FE event at the City of Bristol college. The talk was on project management and was supposed to only be 20 minutes but on Thursday I was asked to fill a 45 minute slot which required a very hasty rewrite! I did my usual evangelising job for ‘agile’ techniques but was also surprisingly positive about Prince2.

I also found out that my workshop session at the JISC All-hands meeting next week has more than twice the attendees than I was expecting (50% of everyone coming by the looks of things!) so that means radically rethinking the type of session I was going to do. I started sketching out ideas for that yesterday evening but I guess thats a job for tomorrow as next week is pretty flat out.